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The whim-wham was an eighteenth-century version of the trifle. It was simply made: you just soaked some sponge fingers in sweet wine, poured some whipped cream over them, and decorated it if you had a mind with almonds, angelica, etc. Its name had much in common with trifle, too, for originally it meant generally ‘something fanciful or trivial’; it was coined as a humorous reduplication of whim.